


I Collected the Stars

by asparagus_writes



Series: Jupiter [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Anakin raises Luke and Leia, Dad!Anakin, Gen, Mechanic Anakin Skywalker, Past Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Slice of Life, hiding two Force-sensitive children from the Empire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:47:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25883071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagus_writes/pseuds/asparagus_writes
Summary: Former Jedi Knight Anakin Skwalker has lost everyone except his twin children. He tries to start over, and he's doing a decent job of it, but it's not that simple. For one thing, raising children, if incredibly rewarding, is harder than it looks.A series of vignettes set in my 'Jupiter' AU about Anakin raising Luke and Leia before Rex ever stumbles across their little family.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa & Anakin Skywalker
Series: Jupiter [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1872661
Comments: 21
Kudos: 217





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Jupiter by Sleeping At Last.

He drains Padme’s emergency slush fund—withdraws the entire balance in wupiupis on some backwater outer rim planet, hoping no one will think to trace it back to them. Having to juggle both twins and the bag of cash in his arms, it’s the last time he uses the Force in years.

(The next time he does, it’s because Luke starts to levitate his stuffed Bantha and Anakin has to stop him before anyone sees. He teaches them a little, when they’re a bit older: just enough to control it.)

He takes them to different nowhere Outer Rim planet and sells the ship when he gets there. After staying about two weeks in a room he’s rented—the owners have started to give him dirty looks because of the crying-in-the-middle-of-the-night his children seem to be so fond of, but it takes that long for him to be comfortable leaving them, even sleeping, with C3PO for any length of time to look for something more permanent—he buys an empty garage with an apartment behind it. It’s in a seedy part of town, otherwise someone else would have snatched it up by now, with the price he ended up paying for it.

Anakin has plenty left over after that (being a Galactic Senator paid incredibly well, and both of them had been paranoid—justifiably so—enough to keep the account well-stocked) so he buys some of the tools he’ll need to do starship and speeder repair work. He knows what will be essential and what he can get a little later on from his years of experience ~~in Watto’s shop. Or working with the hangar techs on his Jedi Cruiser~~.

The extent of the advertising he does for his new business happens when Anakin goes to the starship parts store across town and makes conversation (he brings the twins with him when he does—it’s too far to leave them) and when he makes a sign for the storefront out of an oddly shaped piece of rusted sheet metal he finds in a junkyard.

Not many customers find him in the first months, due to the undesirable location, but that’s okay by Anakin. The twins demand a lot of his attention anyways and he wants to keep his head down in case somebody to comes looking for him. No one does. Not for almost ten years, and even then they don’t mean to.


	2. Chapter 2

Once they’re a few months old, the twins start trying to grab at his hair a lot. He’s been growing it out, to make himself less recognizable, but he pays for it every time he leans over their crib. On a whim, Anakin waves a multi-tool in front of Leia’s face once to see if it will get her to stop crying, and she waves her tiny, clumsy fists at it the same way she grabs at her father’s hair. Sometimes he’ll come into their room at night, just to make sure they’re still there and breathing, and he’ll find one of them staring up at the ceiling like the answers to the mysteries of the Force are written on its blank surface. Not crying, not upset, just staring. Innocently curious, and uncomprehending.

He spends enough time of his own staring at his blank ceiling, unable to sleep, but at least he can do something about it for his children. Anakin decides to make a mobile to hang over their crib. If only something so simple might work on himself.

He gathers several roughly fist-sized pieces of wood—it’s not japor, but it will do—and various pieces of thin metal tubing and wires. (Junkyards really are useful places). He starts by carving simple planets because it’s been a long time since he tried to carve something and as a kid he wasn’t very good. After he’s got the general shape of the first few done, he decides they need something more, since they’re basically just uninspiring balls of wood, though one or two have rings. For a few days, it becomes his routine to pick them up in his hands, hold them for a few minutes, and then put them down again without carving anything. Anakin knows what he wants to etch into the wood, it just hurts too much to do it.

After several times going through this routine, Luke smiles at him one day, and he sees Padmé’s face in his dimples and the way his nose scrunches up. Suddenly it hurts too much not to remember—not to carve the pattern from the necklace he made her when he was nine and about to leave behind everything he’d known.

The symbols that mean _good fortune_ make their way onto some of the planets. He repeats them multiple times, covering the pieces’ whole surfaces. It’s ironic—in death, their mother had terrible luck, and Luke and Leia haven’t exactly won the birth lottery either—but it’s not such a bad wish for the future.

Carving the intricate symbols in the planets makes him more adventurous, so he tries his hand at some stars next, the childish and fake five-pointed shape of them that’s nothing like actual stars. Before he carves any Tatooinian hieroglyphs into those, he makes several failed attempts at a starfighter, similar in shape to the yellow Eta Interceptor he used to fly, until he gets a version he likes. (He doesn’t plan to paint it yellow. He’ll paint the stars that color.)

He carves the symbol for _freedom_ , the only other one he still remembers, on the wooden hull of the starfighter.

Anakin might be able to look up more symbols on the holonet, but that feels like it would be cheating, so he tries to remember himself. It becomes a distraction for him: to wrack his memories of his childhood to find more pieces of the forgotten language. Trying is painful at first, but it’s an old pain compared to his many fresh ones, and it gets easier eventually. However, his search through his own childhood is not fruitful until, once again, his children help him out.

Luke and Leia are having a bad night—the kind where they start crying if he tries to walk out of the room, but they’ll be calm if he just stays close. He’s slumped down to the floor, leaning against the wall opposite their crib, watching through the slats as their eyes flutter shut and the rise and fall of their chests evens out. He’s almost at the point where he wonders if they’re sleeping deeply enough for him to go back to his own bed when the memory hits him: as fleeting as a gust of wind but just as strong.

Shmi and Anakin shared a room to sleep in. She would put him to bed on his sleeping pallet but stay up a while longer before she slept, usually doing some kind of mending work by candlelight. His mother would sit against the wall, like he’s doing now, because the bedroom wasn’t big enough for a chair. One night, Anakin couldn’t sleep, so he just lay there and watched her work. He’s not sure if she ever noticed he was doing it. She was carving a japor snippet. The night was silent and peaceful and safe, and he watched her until she was finished and went to sleep herself.

The next day she gave him the snippet. _A mother’s blessing: strength, wisdom, and compassion._

He doesn’t know what happened to it—probably he forgot to take it with him when he left her. But he doesn’t need to have it to remember now the exact pattern she carved into it.

Anakin silently leaves the room to fetch the half-finished wooden stars—not long enough to set the twins off again—and returns to settle against the wall. He assumes the same pose as his mother and does her same work.

He knows a father’s blessing is protection, prosperity, and loyalty but of course he had never seen the symbol for it.

It doesn’t bother him too much. The twins’ strength, wisdom, and compassion will be from him and Padmé both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, Padmé is dead in this 'verse. Sorry about that...


	3. Chapter 3

At almost three years old, the twins both consider bath-time the highlight of their day. Baths are something he never really got to have as a kid, and after he got to the Coruscant he was always a little wary of them. They always felt like an indulgence to Anakin, which is probably why he lets his kids play in the bathtub longer than he probably should, until the pads of their fingers are as wrinkled as Master Yoda.

(He loves his mother and knows she did her best for him, but he counts it as one of his greatest successes as a parent that his kids aren’t growing up on a desert planet, in the constant heat and sand ~~and slavery,~~ where they couldn’t spare water for baths.)

Anakin had soon realized, right after they both learned how to walk—Leia first, but only by a few days because she started showing Luke how as soon as she figured it out—that trying to give the twins baths one at a time was an exercise in futility. While trying to make sure one didn’t drown and actually got clean, he had to worry about whatever the other twin was getting up to in the other room.

After a memorable incident in which he had entered the twins’ bedroom carrying a wet-haired, freshly clean Leia to find Luke babbling away in the middle of a giant mess—seemingly every item of clothing, blanket, stuffed animal, or toy they owned strewn haphazardly across every inch of floor around him— he started putting them in the tub together. This method presents its own challenges—the number of splash wars they’ve gotten into, thoroughly soaking their father in the process, is astronomical, and if Leia gets soap in her eyes, Luke will start wailing out of pained sympathy—but Anakin can’t deny that it is also more fun this way.

Tonight, the kids are dropping off to sleep after a particularly eventful bath in which Luke tried to help wash his sister’s hair (“I can help, Ley?”) and was met with much squirming and a bit of rough housing when Leia—understandably—didn’t want him too (“No! Dad do it!”). Out of all the grand titles Anakin Skywalker has been given over the course of his life, he thinks the moniker of “preferred-hair-washer” might be one of his favorites.

Luke is already in the crib, asleep, and Anakin’s got Leia in his lap. Though Leia’s hair is less naturally curly than her mother’s was, it seems to have inherited the tendency to get extremely tangled when wet. He’s brushing it out now and parting it so he can give Leia two braids to wear while she sleeps.

He and Padmé were never together often enough for him to do his wife’s hair—to make it a routine like he has with his daughter—but he had always loved playing with her hair when she would let him. Senator Amidala’s outfits often involved elaborate hairstyles, and he lost count of the times he was told he was Not Allowed To Touch lest he mess up her handmaiden Dormé’s careful work.

At moments like this, even two plus years on, the reality of those opportunities missed for frustratingly mundane reasons—the chances he’ll never have again—clings to him like his wet clothes.

Anakin starts in on the first braid, not worrying too much about doing it tightly enough but more worried about making sure the strands don’t get caught in the joints of his right hand. Braiding does require some amount of pulling, so Leia’s lack of resistance to his gentle tugs, her head tilting each time, belies how close to sleep she is, along with the drowsy fluttering of her eyelids.

As soon as he gets the first braid tied off (not his best work but Leia doesn’t seem to mind), Leia leans that side of her head into his chest and snuggles against his body. The wetness of her hair will surely make the few dry spots left on his shirt damp and letting her stay there will force him to do the next braid at a truly unwieldy angle. But the feeling that rises in Anakin’s chest is so far from annoyance. His heart leaps and swells, as if being magnetically drawn to the place where her cheek is adorably smushed against his chest.

Every regret drifting through his head goes away, even the one that wishes his wife were here to share this moment, and the universe narrows down to his daughter.

He just methodically combs the fingers of his left hand through her hair for a few minutes. It hits him, as it sometimes does, that this is _his_ little girl—the same child he and Padme had discussed in hushed middle-of-the-night conversations, imagining what she would be like, unexpected but already so so loved. And here she is now, his little girl who trusts him so completely and without hesitation as to let him wash her hair and not get soap in her eyes and then to fall asleep in his arms afterwards. Leia is so much more than he could have even fathomed back then, but hadn’t he told Padmé he thought their daughter would have her hair? Anakin runs his hand through his daughter’s hair, and as the strands slip between his fingers, he marvels at the warm weight of her in his arms.

By the time he gets around to finishing the second braid, Leia is thoroughly asleep. Though he is halfway to joining her, Anakin feels like he could ignite a star through love alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My parents had a huge bathtub in their bathroom and my twin brother and I would take baths together when we were little. We had so much fun! Having a twin brother is great 10/10 would recommend. Also props to Anakin for learning how to do his daughter's hair (he's grown his out to make himself less recognizable but also he practices on himself).


	4. Chapter 4

Anakin is in the middle of doing a firing cell alignment, which is routine maintenance for a sublight ion drive so he does a lot of them. He had learned to do this by the time he was… not much older than the twins, actually. As a consequence the job is incredibly boring, and it is a welcome distraction when three-year-old Luke toddles over to him and wraps his arms around his father’s leg.

“Hey, buddy,” Anakin says, looking down at his son, who is clinging to him like a kowakian monkey-lizard, except a much cuter version.

“Can I up?” Luke asks. Anakin sets the multitool down on the engine casing and bends down to hoist Luke into his arms. From his improved vantage point, Luke’s eyes go wide as saucers as he takes in the intricate innards of the ion drive. He strains against Anakin’s grip, reaching for the multitool, but he’s too far away.

“No Hoersch-Kessel ion drives for you yet,” Anakin jokes, “but would you like to watch me fix it?”

Luke nods absently, still focused on the unfamiliar engine, and his little brow furrows.

“Hor—horse—” Luke tries to pronounce the unfamiliar words.

“Try just ‘ion drive,’” Anakin suggests, lowering Luke so that he’s sitting on the lip of the exposed section of the ship’s hull, his legs dangling into the space that holds said ion drive. He keeps his left arm wrapped around his son because the ledge is too thin for him to balance on his own and takes up the multitool in his right. Anakin begins a one-handed firing cell alignment—a welcome challenge.

Luke slowly sounds out the words, correctly this time, and Anakin affirms,

“Yep, that’s an ion drive.”

He expects most of it to go over Luke’s head, and it probably does, but Anakin narrates what he’s doing anyways. His son is uncharacteristically quiet, and Anakin feels the need to duck his head down a few times to check Luke’s face to make sure he’s okay. He’s fine, just very intently focused on Anakin’s work.

For all that Anakin could probably complete this in his sleep and knows every part of a Hoersch-Kessel ion drive by feel alone, this time is different. He’s _very_ aware of everything around him: the movement of the individual parts in his mechanical hand, the way the multitool feels like an extension of it, the fabric of Luke’s tunic against his skin, and the soft brush Luke’s hair on his cheek as he leans in. Anakin realizes that he’s meditating, in his preferred style of working meditation that he used almost exclusively during the war. Now, he just doesn’t meditate much, and getting himself to do it is usually way harder than this.

It makes him think of Ahsoka—how he taught her to meditate this way and made sure she knew her way around ion drives and repulsorlifts and hyperdrives. He might have expected the thought of her to pull him unceremoniously out of his meditative state, but strangely it doesn’t. Wherever she is, he just hopes she remembers what he taught her. Especially the mechanical stuff—it’s turned out to be very useful, though he might be biased on that point.

“All done,” proclaims Anakin, ending his light meditation easily when the alignment is complete, and Luke parrots him,

“All done!”

Lifting Luke out of the ship, which provokes a disappointed whine, Anakin steps back and reaches for the section of hull that’s swung outward to give him access to the ship’s inner workings. Luke stretches his arms out too, but his reach is not as long as his father’s. Anakin slowly pulls the metal down halfway, so that its edge goes from being slightly above Anakin’s own head, to level with Luke’s hands.

“Go ahead, but watch your fingers,” he says, and Luke places both his hands next to Anakin’s, lending his small strength to help close it the rest of the way. The hull clicks loudly closed and Anakin leans against the ship, hefting his son in his arms.

“Thank you, Luke,” Anakin whispers into the crown of his head, not really knowing why. Luke must understand something, or just doesn’t care why he’s being thanked, because he chirps brightly,

“You’re welcome, Daddy!”

(Despite both Padmé’s and Obi Wan’s frequent insistences that Anakin had no manners, he has managed to teach a few simple things to the twins, namely _please_ , _thank you_ , and _you’re welcome_. Most beings find it endearing for a child to say those things, and Anakin may or may not have used that fact to help him get a better deal with customers or at the market once or twice.)

“Let’s go find your babysitters,” he tells Luke, “they’ve been sleeping on the job.”

That must be Threepio and Artoo’s cue, because Anakin’s barely taken three steps before both droids and Leia, who is perched on Artoo’s domed top, looking very pleased with herself for getting there, come through the doorway that leads to their living space.

“Oh, there you are, Master Luke!” C3PO frets when he sees them.

Anakin, who knows from experience how difficult it is to climb on Artoo like that and does _not_ want his daughter to take a tumble onto the hard permacrete floor of the garage, shifts Luke to rest on his left hip and scoops up Leia with his free hand. They’re getting a bit big for him to be able to pick them up with one arm now, he reflects. Showing Luke the ion drive has put him in an odd mood.

“Try not to let them get into the garage without me knowing,” Anakin admonishes the droids. He shudders just thinking of one of his kids trying to explore unsupervised and getting accidentally crushed by a loading droid.

Artoo clearly is not thinking along the same lines because he gives Anakin an indignant series of beeps and whirs that roughly translates to a long-suffering: _I’m doing my best, alright?_

Apparently, Artoo’s best is not enough, because after that day, Luke keeps finding his way to his father while he’s working. When Anakin deems the task not to dangerous for Luke to observe, he lets him, finding it very difficult to say no to Luke’s earnest interest. Luke learns and Anakin teaches him. Together they learn (and relearn) the beautiful intricacies of the machines that allow them to fly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't really figure out how to end this one, but it is what it is. Have some Luke and Anakin bonding!
> 
> My idea for this AU is that Luke takes after Anakin with a passion for mechanics and piloting (like in canon). Leia is a bit trickier since she wouldn't be growing up around politics; it wouldn't make sense for her to develop those interests like she did in canon. So in this AU I decided she would be learning how to slice/hack computers and would like sports (for the strategy involved).
> 
> At this point they're still three years old so... a few years before this really becomes apparent, but it's a thing in Make my Messes Matter.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A genuine coincidence: I am eating a freshly-baked cookie while posting this.

The twins are five years old and tomorrow will be their first day at the public school that’s a couple blocks away from the market.

(The very next year, the Empire takes over administration of the school. Anakin wants to pull Luke and Leia out of it but realizes this will cast suspicion—suspicion that they have no love for the Empire, which is entirely true—on their family that they cannot afford, so he doesn’t.)

He has finished his mechanical projects for today. He’s also left a lot for tomorrow, but that’s okay, because he’ll probably need the distraction. Luke and Leia understand what tomorrow means, and Anakin thinks they’re even more jittery than their father is. Or maybe they’re just picking up on his own anxiety and mirroring it—he has learned that his kids are perceptive like that.

Anakin decides that there’s enough time before dinner for them to help him bake something to put in their lunches tomorrow, and he calls them into the kitchen. It occurs to him that they’re continuing a kind of a family tradition, because Padmé used to stress bake. The day before an important vote, he would find Naboo five blossom bread cooling on the counter in her apartment. Or, when he was scheduled to leave for a dangerous mission—the risks of which he couldn’t hide from his wife because she read the Senate war and intelligence briefings— she would send him on his way with a cookie or a melioorun tart she had made the night before.

He had found it incredibly endearing, not least because she was a good baker and he really liked sweets.

As he hunts with Luke and Leia to find the necessary cookie ingredients around the kitchen, he gets the feeling he sometimes does, like he doesn’t belong in this moment. Like he is intruding on Padmé’s territory, doing something that by all rights should be hers to teach their children. She wouldn’t be angry with him, of course, it’s just that the galaxy is—is an unfair place.

And then, he realizes they’re out of chocolate, which they need for the recipe C3PO gave him. Anakin declares that the three of them are taking a trip to the market and, _quick, can they be big kids and show him they can put on their shoes by themselves?_ The twins race to put on their shoes because they like going to the market and because they’re competitive. Luke wins.

They keep their trip relatively short, even though the twins want to play longer with their friend Tess, a Kel Dor child whose mother owns one of the produce stalls. Anakin doesn’t want them to be eating cookies too close to dinnertime, which is about the extent of the strategic decision-making necessary in his life now. ~~If one ignores the fact that stormtroopers are beginning to hang around this market more often and he really doesn’t want to run into one.~~

Chocolate acquired, they make their way home and start putting ingredients into a bowl. Leia diligently packs brown sugar into the measuring cups, and Luke predictably manages to make a mess when adding the Basa root flour, and Anakin thinks that the distraction is working fairly well for all of them.

Luke and Leia’s fingers get incredibly sticky as they roll the finished dough into balls and place them on a baking sheet. They get smudges everywhere but Anakin doesn’t mind; Threepio will clean those up later.

The twins beg him to lift them up about every two minutes so they can watch the cookies baking through the window in the oven and Anakin obliges them each time. He can’t indulge their impatience one the cookies come out—they want to eat them right away, but he tells them they’ll burn their mouths unless they wait a few minutes. In the meantime, they put another batch in to bake. The twins make it seem like he made them wait a thousand years when he finally grabs a cookie for himself and lets them take one too.

The cookies taste much the same as the ones his wife used to make—it’s the same recipe—but they’re slightly different and no matter how many times he makes them, they never will be exact copies of hers.

It becomes silent in the room as they eat—there’s something uniquely good about a fresh cookie warm out of the oven, everyone knows that—until Leia declares:

“My cookie is better than—” she screws up her face to think of a suitable comparison then giggles, “a kiss from a Wookie!”

Anakin has been reading them children’s books lately, trying to get them a bit of a head start on learning to read Basic. It seems like every single line in those books rhymes, so it’s no surprise that the twins now take delight coming up with silly rhyming sayings like that. Luke laughs and repeats her, and soon enough they’re both chanting it over and over, around mouthfuls of cookie.

“Better than a kiss, huh?” Anakin finally interrupts, the phrase having gotten old about ten repetitions ago. He reaches playfully for Luke, meaning to kiss him on the cheek, but Luke realizes what’s happening and squeals. Luke hops off the chair Anakin had pulled up to the counter so he and Leia could reach the bowl of dough and his sister follows him, grinning.

Anakin chases them in circles around the kitchen before he catches up to them, bending over and threading an arm around each of their waists. He pulls them close to him, not roughly, or course, but strong enough that they can’t wiggle away. Anakin tickles their stomachs and they automatically shrink away from his hands but towards him, pressing their backs close against his body. He takes the opportunity to give them big kisses, first on Luke’s cheek, then Leia’s. Though the kids pretended to not have want a kiss from him, all three Skywalkers are wearing wide smiles.

He releases them and ruffles their hair. Once they have recovered from the tickling, Luke asks,

“Can we have another one?”

“After dinner,” Anakin tells them, because he can’t say no outright to those little hopeful faces, but he recognizes a slippery slope when he sees one.

It’s partly his fault, he thinks, for putting them in such a mischievous mood, when they disobey him and each snatch another cookie from where the first batch is cooling on the counter.

Luke and Leia tear out of the kitchen with their stolen prizes, heading towards the garage, not content to just be chased around the kitchen this time.

“Hey!” Anakin calls, unable to keep the smile out of his voice, as he trots after them. He gives them an intentional head start.

When he steps into the garage and flips the lights on, Luke and Leia are nowhere in sight. They play with each other in here most days while he works, so they probably know the nooks and crannies of the space even better than he does. Anakin has long since lost the battle of trying to keep them out altogether, so now he just stipulates he has to be there when they are. If they know the space, it might at least help them avoid the more dangerous parts of it, which is the logic Anakin uses to comfort himself on the subject.

The game of chase has turned into hide and seek, which of course gives his children plenty of time to eat their second cookies. Oh well. Anakin starts to check the most likely spots they could be hiding.

He is struck with the thought that, if they were Jedi initiates, this would be some kind of training exercise in disguise. Evasion, secrecy, strategy, pursuit. Maybe it still is—maybe he should make it into one. As hopeful that Anakin is that he can do everything needed to protect Luke and Leia by himself, he is not naïve enough to think they might never need to defend themselves. Teaching them might help him sleep (a little) better at night.

It could also be dangerous. How much should he teach them about the Force? Would they really be able to hide their powers from other people? Can they hide them if he _doesn’t_ teach them? If he does, they’ll start asking questions. They will anyways.

If the past five years have taught him anything, its that raising children is an inherently risky endeavor. He’ll just have to do what he can to mitigate the dangers and prepare Luke and Leia to deal with them when they come. Or at least that’s what Anakin is slowly trying to accept, but he’s not quite there yet.

Lost in thought as he is, Anakin doesn’t notice the small metal bolt flying through the air towards his back until it has already hit him. It hardly hurts, but Anakin whirls around, peering into the shop to search for the perpetrator. A laugh comes from the direction it was thrown. Leia is impatient, apparently.

“You can’t hide forever, cookie thief!” he calls.

They burn the batch of cookies that’s in the oven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who even knows if public schools are a thing in the galaxy far far away. Hopefully they are, education is important! However, I could definitely see the Empire eventually making it to the Outer Rim, taking over the administration of run-down local schools, and using them to spread propaganda. A way to keep the galaxy complacent with all the authoritarianism and prison camps and police state complete with planet-destroying super weapons. 
> 
> The problem for Anakin would be that having kids that performed badly/bucked the propaganda too much at school (or were too smart) would draw unwanted attention to both them and him. The name of the game would be to make sure that there was never a reason to test them for midichlorians. But he still sends them because it would be too suspicious not to and he's a single working parent whose kids still need to learn their multiplication tables somehow. Not sure I would trust the droids to be full-time childcare and schoolteachers...
> 
> This AN got a bit of social commentary going (support working parents! support single parents!) that I did not originally intend while writing the first few sentences of this. Hope that's okay.
> 
> Anyways, there's a short thematic coda after this that I'll post tomorrow, but this is the last actual vignette of the story. Thanks for reading and commenting!


	6. Chapter 6

This is former Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker’s life now.

Sometimes, when he watches his son’s and daughter’s innocent eyes stare, entranced like it’s the whole universe, up at the little pieces of wood he’s carved for them, when his daughter falls asleep against his chest as her hair slips smoothly through his fingers, when he guides his son’s hands through the familiar parts of an engine, when they both giggle in his ear, breathless after he finally catches them in a tight embrace, he thinks: this is everything.

This is everything.

But when he lays awake at night, alone, head echoing with the sound of an army’s footsteps he’s not sure are a real or imagined threat coming for his family, missing his wife’s presence beside him, a physical ache like he’s been thrown out an airlock without a helmet, or feeling right underneath his heart the tantalizing hum of the kyber crystal that lives in his lightsaber—hidden years ago in the loose floorboard beneath his bed—he thinks:

Is this all there is?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it for this story! Hopefully I'll have more time/inspiration to write more in this AU soon!

**Author's Note:**

> I already have all of these vignettes written, so I'll probably post them every other day or so. They get longer after the first one. I'm starting to get some more ideas about how the AU will go after Make my Messes Matter so that's fun!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Stranger](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28152414) by [OctoRabbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OctoRabbit/pseuds/OctoRabbit)




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